5 takeaways from Ariz. and Mich.

After a brutal and nail-biting build-up, Mitt Romney emerged from two primary contests Tuesday night with important victories under his belt, and Rick Santorum’s momentum was stalled.

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Below are POLITICO’s five takeaways from Arizona and Michigan:

1) A win is a win

It’s the cliche of the cycle, and we’ve found ourselves saying it to defend a Mitt Romney victory more frequently than we’d have ever imagined.

It wasn’t pretty, and he carried Michigan by a smaller margin than in 2008, but the bottom line is that Romney was in a major political fight Tuesday — and he won. He also scored a blowout victory in Arizona. If he had lost Michigan, it’s hard to gauge the level of panic that would have unfolded within GOP ranks.

If history is a guide, Romney’s unlikely to get a huge dose of momentum after his win — the clock will essentially reset itself tomorrow heading into Super Tuesday March 6. For him, the election cycle has been win, no bounce, repeat. And he continues to be eyed warily, and without passion, by a significant chunk of the GOP base.

Still, Romney is now ahead in delegates in a material way after Arizona, a winner-take-all state, at a time when his campaign is attempting to refocus the discussion around the delegate slog as opposed to victory notches in his belt.

Even so, Romney emerged from this bruising fight with some permanent marks as he heads into Super Tuesday. He committed a string of high-profile gaffes, most of them related to his wealth and his ongoing discomfort talking about it, that exposed him as not quite able to take the heat when it gets turned up high.

One of the biggest and most under-reported pieces of news Tuesday was Romney’s acknowledgment that he has harmed himself with his own comments, a humanizing display of frailty about an ultimately incurable trait. His election night speech, while confident, was not “big,” and lacked vision and an overarching message.

It also did not contrast favorably with the one President Barack Obama gave to the UAW earlier in the day, a harbinger of things to come in the fall if Obama is able to maintain this pace.

In the end, it was a night that could have gone badly for Romney and didn’t. And it should, at least for a few days, quell some of the growing noise surrounding his ability to battle for the nomination. If his campaign has learned from past mistakes, it will avoid boasting, keep its head down and run into Super Tuesday as if it’s losing every state by 10 percentage points.

2) Santorum blew a huge opportunity

Rick Santorum lost his last Senate race in Pennsylvania by 18 points, and the week leading up to the Michigan vote was a reminder why.